


White Noise and Burnout

by i_am_betwixt



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2019-05-20 14:30:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14896310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_am_betwixt/pseuds/i_am_betwixt
Summary: The writer has difficulty coping with dreams and reality. After an intense two day set of Dungeons and Dragons sessions as a new DM, the writer decides to do some therapy homework. Feeling burnout from creativity and white noise in the fringes of his consciousness, he writes down his feelings for the day.





	1. Self Referencing New Thoughts

_‘Masks. Yet no statuesque forms of ceramic, metal or wood, nor bodies like clockwork eidolons (the Snake Girl from the Corydon trilogy comes to mind).’_

 

He languished by his table, his room disorganised and scattered with odd bits of paper and dust. The MacBook was open, on the desk, and in front of him.

 

He put _Revolving Doors_ by Gorillaz on,

 

And felt that nostalgia fill him. The roundabout outside his flat was quiet… or, he was drowning out the sound. He could feel nothing outside, the music from his MacBook filling in his head, all else fading away, zoning to the screen in front of him.

 

_‘Is this a story? A daydream? Am I just disassociating?’_

 

_Revolving_ _Doors_ ended.

 

He wants to blame maladaptive daydreaming. This is limbo, he knows it. He’s been daydreaming for days, his coping mechanism for stress and anxiety, but it isn’t working as effectively anymore. He lives in a sea of daydreams. He reads fan fiction endlessly, searching for a story that he can springboard off.

 

_‘I feel like a fiction vampire. Or Grim Tuesday.’_

 

Everything feels like a something. It all leads to what it is similar to. Easier to pick up a reference than describe what it actually feels like or is. His thoughts move faster than his mouth can communicate, than his fingers can type, or write. It’s frustrating, he feels as if he thinks faster than he exists. His thoughts, his dreams, outpace his reality.

 

_‘I’m writing a partially fictitious meta-diary. This is just for me, to cope for my therapy, and yet, now that I have an Archive of Our Own account, it feels wrong to write something and not upload it here.’_

_Edit: The first use of ‘I’ to describe myself, as the writer and narrator in this whole piece. It was musing, but still, this feels like victory, of a kind._

 

He thinks, and isn’t that the problem? He thinks too much, but being out there and being real is tiring, it saps his energy, and there are too many rules. He has so little control, but in dreams he can be anything, do anything. In dreams, he can feel.

 

The story is ending. He can feel it. This thread of a story, this yarn, is finally thinning. There’s little more to write out of a reflection borne out of desperation and pity and frustration. Yet somehow, he feels pride. He wrote this. It isn’t any good, but he wrote it. It’s better than he normally does. Maybe he can just make something out of this.

 

It doesn’t hurt to try.


	2. Wandersomeness of an Unwholesome Kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three days of a strange wanderlust and wanting to leap out of the skin and run, or dissolve. It's a harrying and dissolute feeling. It's consuming. It has laid mine own head to waste.

Finish it. In art school and school and university it was a sticking point to finish things. Then edit them. Then reorder them. But first it needed to be finished. What a shit trio of days its been. His eyes flit from somewhere to nowhere and back again. His mind searches for something to think, reaching. His mind has been reaching for three days to fill his head and satisfy the urge of knowing something.

It's been a struggle.

Music has become a crutch. It colours the silence and fills it. He can't live in silence. He can't be present and himself on his own without it being part of a story. He wants to claw at his skin to satisfy a whim. It's become an itch. Eat something and the itch asks not to eat anymore because it was a waste to eat. To scratch at skin and tear into himself. It's hard to satisfy the urge because he doesn't know where it comes from, only that it seems right. And he knows it shouldn't seem right. Other times he wants to run and run and run until his feet are bloody.

Urges to scream and wail from the sheer pressure of the nothingness he's feeling. He felt like this as a teenager but it was restrained when he was young and feeling these things. As a teenager he was more articulate. He could have identified what this yearning was. Now though, now he had no idea what it was. He felt like some caveman yearning for things yet unable to know. He just felt. But only felt mentally. He wanted to be touched. To know comfort and have others want to comfort him but he knew that it was care he could not receive. He needed a someone to hold onto, to wail into, to feel their fingers and nails digging into his back, to know they were an anchor and know that he was real. And to stay in their arms, for an undisclosed amount of time and not feel like the time was paid for.

Touch starved. He's heard the term before but never has he felt so starved of the feeling of touch. He grows angry at the unfairness of it all. People didn't give comfort. He stays the thought like the urge to tear into himself and wonders how people could live without touch.

He's going mad. He knows he is and he almost wants to be mad to the point of not knowing what he needed. He knew he needed touch. He wasn't going to get it. Friends... they were nice, they were kind, but no one in England could give him touch. It wasn't in the English nature and how he loathed this aspect of it. He's not doing well anymore. He's in his mid twenties now, and this is all terrible. He wants to shirk all his friends and leave them to rot. None of them could give him what he needed so desperately. Not anymore. He had just realised it, and allowed himself to know it. He was on his own.

Rage. Fury. Helplessness. Wanting to cry. Loneliness. Loss. Grief. Vulnerable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thoughts erupt from my skull

**Author's Note:**

> I, the writer, needed to write this down.
> 
> I disassociate when I tell a story, or dream, and my therapist tells me that I should write this down.
> 
> Here, I am anonymous and I can cope, and write. I write for me (and me alone), and have a such a shoddy memory that this will serve as a good record for when I forget I wrote this. I want to try writing and being me, again.
> 
> Sorry for this state of weirdness, and wish any wary readers a pleasant day.


End file.
